Ryan Reynolds In A Box

Watched Buried the other day, and it got me thinking even more about what I would want Four Walls to end up like. Somehow I got from thinking about Buried and how it relates to Four Walls for me, by Paul Conroy (Ryan Reynolds) having different objectives and calling people, and I thought that this is what I want Jason to seem like; he has objectives. But unlike Paul Conroy, Jason has control over how the conversation plays out with him and Detective Spencer.

Buried is a 90 minute film that takes place entirely in a box. This may seem like a really boring concept, but it's one of the only films that I've had a real sense of the character. I think that keeping the story within a confined space without flashbacks or other techniques that take the audience out of the box make it difficult to not notice the character's traits. I think that putting two characters in a room will lower the audience's attention to what the character's motives are and focus more on the conversation between the two characters.

But because Jason is going to be in control for the the first two acts, it may be that the script is more of a monologue with some arguments placed to bring tension between the characters and to bring the build-up to the climax.

Because Jason has schizophrenia I want it to make it hard for the audience to know what his motives are for his actions. Also that his motives and emotion change quite drastically throughout, not so much as that he goes from crying to ecstasy within a minute. But so much that he goes from being quite aggressive, to very introverted. Or cooperative to ignorant. Changes like these will add to the fear in Jason and also make it very unpredictable as to what will happen next. I should be careful not to make his emotions repeat throughout the script though, cos no-one likes a boring movie.

Four Walls

This is a draft for the logo of my movie intro. I decided on a title for the film and a basic idea of the logo, pretty basic, the logo inside a box to suggest being boxed in and seeing as the title is a different way of describing a room it kind of makes metaphorical sense. Even though this a rough draft only made in 5 minutes on Photoshop I really like how it turned out, I'll leave my brain to come up with something awesome in the subconscious for a day or two, but I'll have another go at making something good.


The main thing I wanted to do with the film is for the majority of it to be set in an interrogation room, the story unfolding in spoken form from the characters, no flashbacks just everything described by the characters. The story's main protagonist is a detective called Jonathan Spencer, a detective in his late 30s currently working on a case about a serial killer who they have little idea about. Spencer is asked to interrogate another serial killer, Jason Ward, who has just been arrested after being caught in the act of killing his latest victim. Even though Ward has killed around 5 victims and suspected of at least 6 more, he is only in his early twenties. There is very little else known about Ward by the police and has been brought in to be interrogated to help find out more about him. Spencer has been asked by one of his colleagues to interrogate Ward about his murders.


Spencer finds out through interviewing Ward that Ward thinks he has killed at least 15 people. Spencer also finds out that Ward marks each victim by cutting the right index finger ligament on the right hand just in the fold of the wrist, Ward says that when the bodies are found, they will easy to identify as who killed them.


I haven't worked out the rest of the film, but I'll get there eventually.

Thriller

No, not Michael Jackson. The thriller genre is something that can be any genre of movie along with thriller technique throughout it. The most common is action thriller, with the likes of No Country For Old Men, The Hurt Locker and Pitch Black. These films are all thrillers, but all classed as different hybrid genres all together.

No Country For Old Men is a crime/thriller, The Hurt Locker is mainly a war/drama/thriller and Pitch Black is a sci-fi/thriller. All these films display techniques of thriller, but the settings of all of them create a hybrid genre.

No Country For Old Men is a story about discovery, a man the remnants of a drug dealer shoot out in the southern states of america, he finds that one goon has managed to escape with a briefcase of money, but died shortly after he has escaped. The man takes the briefcase and hides it under his house, then starts being chased by a hitman, who is willing to kill anyone who needs to be killed to get to the money.

The film has a plot that drives a lot of the suspense, with there being little to know about the story other than what is given in the first twenty minutes. The hitman, played by Javier Badrem, holds most of the tension in the story, with there not being much known about him, this holds a lot of curiosity in the audience and therefore not knowing what he is capable of. The introduction of his character shows him killing an innocent man for his car, this will make the audience feel very frightened of him. Where as the man who has the briefcase, played by Josh Brolin, has more information given about him, making him have a greater emotional connection with the audience, the difference in the feelings of the audience to the two main characters creates the suspense. No Country For Old Men really sets a standard for thrillers, as there is very little dialogue, lots of silence and a lot of tense moments that kept my heart racing.

The Hurt Locker still shows a lot of scenes with suspense, the main reason why it is such a successful thriller is that it is set as a film that happens. About bomb technicians in Iraq, it is a very relative film, that creates its tension through scenes that the audience can believe could or maybe have happened.

There isn't that great of a connection between the audience and the characters but, because they are soldiers, the audience immediately feels respect towards them, as they have been fighting to protect their country and other countries. Later on in the film, there becomes a very big emotional connection to the characters, with the introduction of the main character's family and a very meaningful scene between the main character, James, and his fellow troop, Sanborn. This final conversation between them summons all the emotion that the introduction of the film is missing. There is a gradual increasing feeling towards the characters as they go through their daily lives in Iraq, with them losing people and encountering different obstacles that they have to overcome together, but sometimes not at all, with there being a lot of friction between James and Sanborn.

Pitch Black is a sci-fi thriller that gets it's thrills from an alien being that lives on a planet, where a ship has just crash landed. From the outset, the crew come across things that evoke curiousity in the audience, from when they first view the planet surface, it has two suns. Creating a constant light on the surface.

The crew find a human outpost a few miles away from their wrecked ship, but the outpost is wrecked and looks like it hasn't been used for a number of decades. They venture into one of the homes, which is completely deserted, but what is immediately focused on is a planetarium that shows that both suns will be setting for a month within the next day. They quickly find that some there is are aliens living in tunnels underneath the planet, and when both suns go down, the aliens will come out of the tunnels and devour any living thing on the surface. What is added to the start the tension is that there were convicts on board the ship. All of them died, but one, who has escaped onto the planet and starts to spy on the other survivors. The tension of Pitch Black is held in the curiousity and fear around the convict, and more so about the alien race as the film goes on.

The films show different ways of creating tension, but it mostly done by convening curiosity about something on screen, this can be done visually; by not showing the audience something, or in not stating what something is capable of, or by putting the characters in a situation that could be real, but still has many other possible outcomes.